Algorithmics - the design and analysis of algorithms and complexity theory - constitutes the scientific foundation for reasoning about quantitative aspects of computing, i.e. the use of resources like computing time and storage.

Design and analysis of algorithms is concerned partly with the designand analysis of efficient algorithms solving concrete problems, partly with identifying common patterns of problems and associated algorithmic paradigms leading to efficient solutions. As an orthogonal issue, data-structures play an important role, partly because every algorithm needs to organize data systematically.

The goal of complexity theory is to determine the amount of computational resources needed to perform certain computational tasks. The efforts to achieve these goals have only been partly successful, the major shortcoming being the inability to prove lowerbounds for general models of sequential computation. One trend is therefore to study other models (including models for parallel computation). Through characterization of various computational models according to their relative computing power it has often been possible to give quite accurate estimates for how difficult a computational task is.

The algorithmics research group at DAIMI covers the following research topics (but is not limited to):

• The design and analysis of algorithms and data structures
• Complexity theory
• Bioinformatics (the design and analysis of algorithms and data structures for analysis of biological data)
• External memory algorithms and data structures
• Cache obliviousness (identifying paradigms, technics, data structures and algorithms)
• Computational geometry
• String algorithms and data structures
• Algebraic and number theoretic algorithms

• 18th IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity (COMPLEXITY 2003).
• EEF Summer School on Massive Data Sets 2002
• ALGO 2001, joint event of the 9th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2001), the 5th Workshop on Algorithm Engineering (WAE 2001), and the 1st Workshop on Algorithms in BioInformatics (WABI 2001).
• The research group has 2000-2003 been the coordinating site of ALCOM FT (Algorithms and Complexity - Future Technologies), a joint effort between eleven of the leading groups in algorithms research in Europe (supported by the European Commission).